This invention relates to the flooring art and more particularly to a portable sectional flooring system especially suited for sports activities such as basketball and other like uses.
Special flooring systems for indoor and outdoor sports activities, dancing and other like uses have been proposed in the prior art. Such flooring has been formed from a variety of materials including linoleum, wood, plastic and concrete. Among the drawbacks of such prior art floors are their high initial cost, permanancy of installation and the fact that they must be made and installed at the flooring site rather than being prefabricated and carried to the desired assembly location.
Furthermore, the usual floors suitable for sports activities such as basketball present special problems in requiring a smooth playing surface which is very firm and solid for the performance of the sports activity thereon. The problems in meeting these flooring requirements to be suitable for sports activities played thereon are exacerbated when attempts have been made to provide these floors in a portable and/or sectionalized form of construction.
Still, there are many environments and applications where permanent installation of a sports activity type of floor is not dictated or justified. Some locations may require that the sports activity type flooring be removable such that the location is succeptable to utilization for purposes other than sports activities.
These needs have given rise to the necessity for providing a portable sectionalized flooring system which not only can be laid expeditiously and easily when required for performance of the sports activity thereon, but which also will furnish the required smooth and solid surface to meet the prerequisites for the sports activity, keeping in mind that a sports playing activity such as basketball also requires that the playing floor have the resiliency characteristics of permanently installed basketball courts. Without such floor resiliency for playing the sports activity a portable sectional flooring system may be found unsuitable.
Prior art efforts to solve the above problems while still meeting the stringent requirements for playing surfaces suitable for sports activities have been dificient, particularly with respect to efforts to develop an acceptable sectional flooring system. Aside from the excessive cost involved in initial fabrication of the sectionalized flooring systems which have been heretofore proposed for sports activity use, the time and consequent expense of putting down these temporary sectionalized floors and thereafter removing them subsequent to the playing activity have all contributed to their general unacceptability. Furthermore, where these prior art sectionalized floors must be repeatedly put down and taken up before and after successive sports activities, prior flooring systems suitable for such purpose have frequently required complicated and separate parts for their assembly, parts that may be easily lost or misplaced while the floor sections are in their disassembled state of nonuse or in storage.